Guest Room/Contemporary Art is the brainchild of Nicolas Lemmens and Olivia Delwart. Situated in a quiet neighborhood on top of a hill in what is known as upper Brussels (there are two levels to the city), the gallery is a small white cube facing onto the street; it is open Wednesday and Saturday from 2:00 to 6:00 pm, and by appointment. The artist’s bio and checklist, as well as copies of catalogs, are lined up on the inside window ledge and are easily visible to the passerby who stops to look inside the window (it is lit up at night until 12:00 p.m.), and is curious to know more. According to Lemmens, the literature is meant to get people interested, without putting any pressure on them. After all, if you step inside, you would literally be coming for your second look and, one assumes, a more intimate engagement.

The eighth exhibition (or Guest #8) was of the drawings of Patrick Michael Fitzgerald, an Irish artist who lives and works in Vizcaya, outside Bilbao, Spain. In an e-mail conversation with Chris Ashley, an artist who directs Some Walls a curatorial and writing art project in Oakland (CA), Fitzgerald wrote: I still believe that painting can respond directly to the world of things, experience, and “reality” on its own terms. Many of the drawings were done in 2009, while Fitzgerald was an Artist in Residence in Andratx, Majorca. Done in colored pencil, ink, and collage, all the drawings are vertical and approximately 12 by 9 inches. The inspiration behind them seems to be the place where they were made. The starting point for the “Andratx” drawings, as many of them are titled, is something ordinary—a tree, evening light, and shadow.

Using a vocabulary that consists of a few vertical, horizontal, and diagonal lines (a skeletal geometry) juxtaposed against ragged and rounded shapes, and perfectly cut, collaged circles, and pristine cut-out spaces, Fitzgerald responds to something palpable in the world. The often-layered space, while alluding to nature, also conveys drawing as an accumulation of decisions, as well as a visual indication of time past. One both sees and sees into these drawings, with the layering reiterated by the use of collage in the form of the perfectly round circles. For Fitzgerald, drawing isn’t only a surface waiting to register the artist’s marks; it is a thing. In some cases, it isn’t hard to make an equation between the drawing and its title, but to try and locate the works only within the discursive realm is to miss their strength.

Fitzgerald believes drawing is a construction that explores the tension between structure and dissolution. In Andratx (Pools, Thoughts), 2009, he partitions the drawing with three red lines into three areas, with the one along the bottom further divided by a diagonal red line rising from near the left corner. The diagonal, interacting with another right above it, turns the areas they enclose into tilting planes, and, at the same time, introduces a spatial possibility that Fitzgerald builds upon with a bluish-purple form across the drawing’s lower half. Rounded brown shapes packed closely together share the same plane as the bluish-purple shape (the pool?). Over this field, Fitzgerald attaches perfect circles done in different shades of blue, gray, and magenta, as well as two cut from a printed page of blue and black. These circles compel us to read the drawing tactilely, as well as visually. They pull our attention in, even as they become a disruption.

For all the deliberate thought that goes into these drawings, they feel neither restrained nor governed by an overriding goal. In fact, they feel like something the artist found. Each drawing is made up of a different group of colors, and the shapes and marks feel intrinsic to the drawing. Sometimes the way a bar-like shape overlays another evokes the possibility that the artist used tape to decide where something goes; this recalls for me the late works of Piet Mondrian. By responding to his immediate environment, Fitzgerald shares something with two older abstract artists, Raoul De Keyser and Thomas Nozkowski. Fitzgerald’s works do not suffer by comparison.

Fitzgerald’s vocabulary is basic—there is nothing elaborate or stylish about his lines and circles, rough and ragged shapes. He relies on colored pencils, ink, and collage—nothing fancy. And yet—and this is why Fitzgerald seems to me to be on the verge of becoming an important and singular artist—the work comes across as taut and fresh, brimming with an awareness that the act of seeing is a construction, at once fluid and disrupted.

BIHOTZ, THE title of Patrick Michael Fitzgerald’s exhibition at the Rubicon Gallery, is the Basque word for heart, both anatomically and figuratively speaking. Fitzgerald’s work is about the self’s engagement with the world, both the physical self and the thinking, feeling self, the essence of personal identity. The paintings themselves are abstract, although they do evoke spaces and systems including, as a catalogue note mentions, the biological system that is the human body. All of this is conveyed with great verve, inventiveness and wit.

Fitzgerald is not a representational artist, though. He doesn’t make pictures that resemble the way things look. He makes pictures that correlate to the way things are, or theories we have about the way things are. One suspects that there are people who just would not get his work at all, who could not really relate to it, and not because of any lack on the part of either the work or the people. What he does emerges from a dialogue between sets of conventions and possibilities. That is, he uses the language of painting and drawing rather in the way that a musician will use an inherited tradition.

The tension that arises from the combination of predictability and unpredictability makes the work interesting. If you have no familiarity with or liking for a particular musical form or, in Fitzgerald’s case, abstract painting, you are unlikely to be persuaded. So his potential audience is likely to be specialised and to that extent limited. He’s not an especially Irish artist. There’s a distinctly international flavour to what he does. In fact, although he was born in Ireland, he attended Chelsea College of Art in London, and he is based in northern Spain, close to Bilbao – hence the show’s Basque title. And in that demanding international context, his work is easily as good as anything you’re likely to find.

Fortunately, my studio stays cool. Outside it might be over 30 degrees but I can still work in a pleasant enough environment, my studio is on street level and never gets the full impact of the sun. Over the last month or so, I have been working on a number of both large and small paintings...here are a few images. All these paintings are are in process, some nearer completion than others:

About this blog

This is the weblog of artist Patrick Michael Fitzgerald. Here you will find images, reflections and information in and around his studio practice. It is not a diary or journal but rather an online notebook. For an overview of the artist's work and biographical information please visit the artist's home page:

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"I think they (painters) always just hope that they will be able to unlock the valves of sensation which just open out the whole appearance" Francis Bacon, in an interview. (artpress 215 Juillet/Aout 98 p.22).

A thinking reed.—It is not from space that I must seek my dignity, but from the government of my thought. I shall have no more if I possess worlds. By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like an atom; by thought I comprehend the world.Blaise Pascal (1623–1662)